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A Leg Rebuilt, a Life Renewed for Jay Williams

Jay Williams, a former Duke guard and national player of the year who nearly died in a motorcycle accident, is an ESPN analyst.Credit
Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

DURHAM, N.C. — Jay Williams had a dream.

On the night before his first college basketball game — before he started for Duke at Madison Square Garden, before he became a national champion and the occupant of Michael Jordan’s old locker in Chicago — Williams fell asleep in a hotel room. He saw himself spinning in the air, around and around, over and over, until a red fire hydrant came into view.

“So weird,” he thought when he woke up.

Williams forgot about the dream until nearly four years later, until June 2003, on a side street on the North Side of Chicago. He sat atop a red-and-black Yamaha R6, a sport bike that weighed about 400 pounds and boasted a 600-cubic-centimeter engine. He revved the engine once and heard it purr, the gear, he believed, in neutral.

He loved that sound, but he especially loved the way he felt those times when his bike shot forward. “Like how I felt in transition,” Williams said, “like if I caught the ball with a full head of steam and knew I was going to score.” Sometimes, he pushed the bike past 120 miles per hour, faster, faster, faster, until the landscape blurred.

On that afternoon in June, Williams again revved the engine, only this time, the motorcycle surged forward unexpectedly, shot like a bullet from a gun. The front wheel lifted off the ground for an accidental wheelie. Williams was not wearing a helmet, did not have a proper license, was in violation of his contract with the Chicago Bulls. He gripped the handlebars, which only seemed to make the bike go faster, which only made him lose control.

Williams clipped the pole with the left side of his body, which sent him spinning, around and around, over and over. He could not feel his left side, or anything from the waist down. He did not think about death, amputation or depression. He thought only about his career.

He lay there, numb, in shock, terrified but so full of adrenaline that his body blocked out most of the pain. It felt as if someone were pouring water on him. He passed out and woke up in an ambulance, passed out again and woke up in a hospital. Even the doctors looked scared. They needed to contact his parents, needed to operate immediately. They worried about amputation, about death.

Williams remembered little but clung to an image from the scene, his first glance sideways as he spun.

There it was: a red fire hydrant.

He screamed: “You threw it all away! You threw it all away!”

An Inescapable Memory

Imagine the worst day of your life.

Then imagine confronting that day every single day thereafter.

Imagine lying in intensive care, watching on television as your team drafts your replacement. Imagine lying on your back, for months at a time, unsure if you will walk again, your leg held together by 100 staples and various metal contraptions.

Imagine the taunts, the ridicule, the built-in comeback — “Go buy another motorcycle, Williams.” Imagine walking through an airport — “Way to screw your life up, Williams.” Imagine working for ESPN, analyzing games — “Should have stuck to motorcycles, Williams.”

Imagine life as the Guy Who Threw It All Away.

“I’ve thought back to that moment a lot because people won’t let me forget,” Williams said. “And this might sound crazy, but it was the worst decision I made and the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Williams, 31, can say that now, more than nine years removed from the accident that nearly ended his life and irrevocably altered it. It took him that long to come to terms with the entirety of his story — high school all-American, national player of the year and national champion at Duke, No. 2 overall N.B.A. draft selection, and all that before the accident, before the hospital, before the injury that ended his professional career after one season and made him a retiree at 21.

In a series of interviews over the last three months, Williams, for the first time, detailed all that he went through.

For years, Williams struggled with depression. He refused to wear shorts or show anyone his left leg. He asked the inevitable: why me? He took too much pain medication, too much OxyContin in particular, for too long. He blew out the candles for his 22nd birthday in bed. He spent years in rehabilitation. He resented the teammates who lacked his drive but remained in the N.B.A., collecting paychecks, accolades, even championship rings. He cried himself to sleep. He went to therapy. He moved to New York City and tried to become an agent and drank alcohol frequently.

In those dark years, he would run into people who expected the image Jay Williams once projected to the world: that of the clean-cut Duke point guard who posed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in khakis and a letterman’s jacket, flashing a thumbs up, the photograph that best seemed to embody the stereotype of Duke, so prim and pristine. In strangers’ eyes, where he once saw awe or jealousy, he now saw pity, and from people, normal people, who could never understand the gifts he held that vanished on that street.

At his lowest point, Williams did more than consider suicide. “I remember lying in my bed,” he said. “And I’m just tired of being here. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I was so afraid to face people. And I didn’t really know who I was. And I didn’t really want anybody to see me. And I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Williams glanced at his mother, Althea Williams, as he recounted the story. He continued: “I mean, to the point where I sat there, and I had this pair of scissors in my hand. I just kept going on my wrist. I wasn’t trying to go sideways. I was going vertical. I didn’t want to be here. At all.”

His mother added: “I came in. I saw it. I slept in the room every day after that.”

“That was the lowest point in my life,” Williams said. “And if I had more time, if the scissors weren’t dull, I think I would have followed through with it. I can’t say for sure. But I was leaning toward that.”

Mementos and Scars

Williams now lives in Durham, near the site of his greatest triumphs, surrounded by magazine covers and mementos from the glory days. A framed letter from Mike Krzyzewski reads, in part, “I loved coaching you.” Pictures show Williams with Duke assistants, Duke teammates; on defense, clad in a Duke jersey. There is little from his lone season with the Bulls.

When Duke’s archrival, North Carolina, won the national championship in 2009, someone rang Williams’s doorbell, and when he opened it, he saw toilet paper covering much of his property. He suspected the Tar Heels fan next door. By the next morning, the toilet paper had been removed.

Mostly, Williams lives in peace, with his mother and a Rottweiler named Heaven, who replaced a Rottweiler named Duke who died a few years back.

Upstairs, near the pool table, surrounded by his Duke memorabilia, Williams allowed pictures of his leg to be taken for the first time since the accident.

“It looks pretty gnarly, dude,” he said.

The leg resembled a map of Williams’s lost years: remnants of 10-plus operations; marks from the 100 staples; a scar that ran from pelvis to ankle; smaller divots from the numerous knee scopes. Williams sustained a total knee dislocation in the accident. He tore every ligament. He dislocated his pelvis. He ripped through a nerve in his left foot that took a year to regenerate, the pain comparable to that of childbirth, so severe it would wake Williams in the middle of the night. He severed an artery. He tore the hamstring from the bone.

As he lay in the hospital, his leg atrophied. He lost muscle, then tone, until the leg withered away and looked to Williams like a pencil, or a toothpick. Doctors told Williams he might never again be able to get an erection, despite all the pictures of scantily clad, beautiful women his friends jokingly left during hospital visits.

“It looked similar to wounds I’ve seen from military men and women, coming back from battle,” said Jason Gauvin, one of Williams’s physical therapists, who now owns and runs Athletic Advantage Physical Therapy in Durham. “Like he had been hit by an I.E.D., with multiple severe injuries at the hip, knee and ankle joints.”

Often, Williams wondered how he ended up there. His interest in basketball sprouted from trips he took with his mother to help his grandmother through dialysis, drives up the Garden State Parkway, where he shot quarters over the front seat and into the baskets for the tolls. Racked by insecurity, consumed by self-doubt, Williams would score 40 points and ask his mother if it was true, if he could play in college. This from an all-American.

Williams blossomed late on the national scene, according to Dresden Baluyot, his best friend and a fellow native of Plainfield, N.J. One high school coach even urged Williams to accept an early scholarship offer to Fordham.

He did not, and later impressed Krzyzewski with his game tape. Krzyzewski, the Duke coach, saw a compact, powerful point guard playing out of position, on the wing. He loved the way Williams attacked the basket, so low to the ground, so ferociously, as if the rim had somehow angered him.

“He could be an N.F.L. running back dribbling the basketball,” Krzyzewski said. “Like he’s that strong. Like he jumped out of the screen. I knew as soon as I saw him he’d be special. Really, he was one of the most explosive players in the history of college basketball.”

Williams saved his best games for the biggest moments. He took over against Kentucky; buried North Carolina with 3-pointers; led the so-called Miracle Minute comeback against Maryland, winning after trailing by 10 with less than 60 seconds to play. One late Williams 3-pointer sealed Duke’s national title in 2001, and there it was, another dream come true.

That was Williams, instinctive and electric, the consensus national player of the year his junior season. The Duke assistant Chris Collins spied Williams after one his worst performances, on an exercise bike before his next contest, at Michigan in 2001, soaked in sweat. He tallied 14 points and 2 assists in the first five minutes as Duke jumped to a 23-4 lead.

“To this day, I say no one loved playing basketball more than Jason,” Collins said in his Duke office. “In terms of just playing games, how that felt, no one lit up more than he did.”

While at Duke, Williams decorated his body with tattoos, quotations and symbols that meant far more later on. On his right leg, he inked the Chinese symbol for sacrifice; on his right arm, two hands clasped together, praying, next to the words “To err is human. To forgive is divine.” He also added this, from Gandhi: “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from indomitable will.”

Williams nearly left after Duke won the national championship in his sophomore season. By then, when Baluyot walked with his friend around campus, he said, Williams seemed “more like a god.” He signed autographs, took pictures, soaked in all the adulation.

Krzyzewski dared Williams to be different, to stay and obtain his degree. He majored in sociology, graduated early and turned professional after his junior season. For his final thesis paper, he studied athletes who left college early, their backgrounds, why they failed or succeeded.

His mother threw a draft party for him in Manhattan on the night in 2002 when the Bulls selected him second over all, behind Yao Ming, the Chinese center taken by the Houston Rockets. Althea invited all of Williams’s former girlfriends. That was awkward. The family celebrated until sunrise, exes notwithstanding.

Williams left for Chicago the next morning, the world spread below him, ripe with promise.

Ups, Downs and a Disaster

On the North Side of Chicago, near the intersection of Fletcher and Honore Streets, there are no reminders that Jay Williams threw it all away in this quiet neighborhood crowded with two-story homes and parallel-parked cars. There is, however, more than one bright red fire hydrant, along with Bulls fans who remember what could have been and what was not.

Williams wanted the Bulls to draft him, wanted to follow Jordan, whose locker had sat empty until Williams took it and ratcheted up already enormous expectations. Fans screamed his name while he walked the streets. He drove down Interstate 90, where his face filled a billboard. And he thought to himself, “You made it.”

In his rookie season, Williams played against Jordan, who was then with the Washington Wizards. Jordan went at Williams on several consecutive possessions. Each time, Jordan told Williams how he would score — first over the left shoulder, then fake over the left shoulder and shoot over the right, and so forth — and each time, Jordan scored exactly as he said he would.

Williams asked to be called Jay around then, instead of Jason, to avoid confusion with the N.B.A. guard Jason Williams, known as White Chocolate, and the retired forward Jayson Williams, who later pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in the shooting death of a limousine driver. He never legally changed his name, but Jay stuck.

In hindsight, the change was indicative of a period of transformation.

Althea Williams moved into a house near the Bulls’ practice facility, where she often rebounded while her only son shot jumpers after midnight. They remained as close as ever. Duke players called her Mama Will. She called them “dude” and introduced herself as Jay’s sister and carried pompoms to the games. Even now, she often stays with her son and coaches the Durham Senior Divas, a cheerleading squad.

She watched her son struggle to adapt to the N.B.A., to the lifestyle, to all the losing after he accumulated a 95-13 record at Duke. Williams defended Allen Iverson one game, Jason Kidd the next, Steve Nash the game after that. He fought for playing time with Jamal Crawford. He went from regimented Duke, with every day planned to the minute, into a looser environment, with millions of dollars in his bank account and more free time than hobbies with which to fill it.

“I didn’t know how to handle it at first,” Williams said. “I didn’t know how to be around it. Guys were on the bench, trying to kick it to girls in the stands, having ball boys run over. I mean, some guys were high.”

Asked to clarify, Williams said: “There were guys smoking weed before games. Guys asking in the middle of the game, ‘Do you smell popcorn?’ ”

He noticed the nervous laughter around the kitchen table. “You think I’m playing,” Williams said. “Can you imagine! Guys are gambling. They’re playing dice in the back of the plane for money. Like, we just lost by 30 tonight! And we’ve got a game tomorrow! It bugged me out.”

Still, Williams did not live like a monk back then. He attended the rookie symposium and listened to little of what was said. He fell into a lifestyle he described as “typical” of the N.B.A. He took private planes to Las Vegas with his friends, gambled, frequented nightclubs, fought with his parents. “I lost who I was,” Williams said.

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By the end of his first season, he started to feel more comfortable, more able, especially on the court. That June, he returned to Duke, where he spoke at a basketball camp. Collins said Williams played pickup games that weekend at a level he had never previously reached, schooling his college counterparts, scoring at will, pulling his own Jordan. “Just thinking about it gives me chills,” Collins said.

Williams later told the campers that they could never predict the future, that they needed to stay in school as much as they needed to practice. “You never know what will happen,” he said.

He flew back to Chicago the next morning. His motorcycle sat in the garage. He had picked up the hobby after college, when it seemed normal, when Kobe Bryant arrived at a game on a bike and Jordan sponsored his own race team, Michael Jordan Motorsports, and Shaquille O’Neal reportedly raved about his Harley-Davidson collection.

Williams first purchased a Yamaha R3 with a red-and-black frame, a nod to his new team’s colors. His mother hated the idea of the bike. She put gum in the ignition and joked about throwing the motorcycle off a nearby cliff.

The day after he spoke to the campers, Williams went for that fateful ride, crashed into that pole, smashed his leg in pieces. The news spread fast. Collins thought back instantly to what Williams told the campers. Baluyot felt nauseated and went home sick. Williams’s parents, who were in New Jersey, sped toward Chicago. Krzyzewski flew there on a private plane from Colorado, worried “about Jason’s recovery and, at a higher level, about him not being able to use his gift.”

Althea stepped into the intensive care unit and slapped her son’s head.

She yelled, “Boy, didn’t I tell you not to ride that bike?”

A Team as a Family

Williams spent five weeks on his back, in intensive care, his leg propped up, hopped up on pain medication. There were no windows in the unit, only darkness and artificial light. One night, a nearby roof collapsed during a party, and Williams sat there, high and scared, as he listened to the screams. He hallucinated regularly. He once saw his father hovering over the bed and his mother near the ceiling.

The Bulls’ front office helped Williams beyond its contractual obligations, with his medical bills and other expenses. It paid some of Williams’s second-year salary, too. But his teammates in Chicago? Never heard from them.

“You’re like, this has to be a movie, this has to be a dream,” Williams said. “I have to be tripping. There’s no way this could happen to me. I’m too good of a guy.”

After the stint in intensive care, Williams flew back to Duke. He rented a house near the Krzyzewskis. The university surrounded her son like a “cloaking device,” Althea Williams said. “Like something out of ‘Star Trek.’ ”

Krzyzewski stopped by occasionally, even assessed the form on Williams’s jump shot once he got around to shooting again. Carlos Boozer flew back to hang out. Chris Duhon pushed Williams’s wheelchair around. Mike Dunleavy Jr. sent text messages. Here was everything Krzyzewski talked about in college, a basketball team that doubled as a family. “Wow,” Williams thought, “everything he preached to us was real.”

Williams did some type of physical therapy every day, often twice, for two years. His mother prayed at least that often. When he asked what if, she flipped the question. What if he had died? What if he had lost his leg? Gauvin, the physical therapist, took one look at that leg, all gnarled and scarred, and told Williams he was lucky the surgical team in Chicago had managed to save it below the knee.

While in therapy, Williams masked his depression, same as he did in public. He treated each session like a game, each repetition like a critical championship moment.

At first, Williams’s knee bent very little. He could not squat, or ride a bicycle, or sit down without pushing the knee at an angle awkwardly in front of him. He worked on bending, on squatting, on flexibility.

Gauvin and the rest of the therapists taught Williams how to walk again. They broke it down, step by excruciating step: developing the strength and balance to stand upright, then the ability to accept weight on the injured leg, then the mechanics of taking an actual step. When Williams inched forward like a robot, still unsure of how to perform this most basic function, they told him to forget the details and remember his athleticism, to do what came naturally.

Williams learned to walk again. He learned to balance on one leg, to walk across a balance beam, to jump, skip, jog, run, sprint. He went from a wheelchair to a walker to two crutches to one crutch to no assistance. He redeveloped muscle tone. When he ran the steps at Duke’s football stadium, he swelled with emotion as he thought about not only the work involved but the number of people it took to put him back together again: the therapists, doctors, surgeons and nurses; the friends and family members and coaches. A village, a team, another dream fulfilled.

Miraculous, Gauvin called it.

“There’s no way we could ever appreciate the loss of function he sustained,” Gauvin said. “We could never function like Jason could. He was amazing. He is amazing. He will always be Jason who wrecked the motorcycle and ended his career. But he’s also so much more than that.”

‘Best Job in the World’

Williams steered his black Mercedes S550 toward the office, which, on this Saturday in December, happened to be Dean Smith Center, in nearby Chapel Hill.

“Good old Carolina,” he said as he pulled onto campus, which sounded strange coming from Mr. Duke. “I love this place. That old Carolina blue. It’s so beautiful, man.”

That Williams starred for North Carolina’s rival was not lost on the locals. As he prepared for an ESPN broadcast, they chided his purple shirt, which matched the color of that day’s opponent, East Carolina. They asked for pictures and reminisced about old games, old plays, like the shot he swished from the Carolina logo near midcourt. One usher even called him “Jay ‘Carolina’ Williams.” He shook his head and smiled.

Williams talked basketball. He talked Atlantic Coast Conference basketball, Tar Heels basketball, national college basketball. He used the word “platitude.” He dropped a reference to the movie “The Great White Hype.” He traded jokes with the referees. He goofed around with the play-by-play announcer, Adam Amin, a Bulls fan.

As the game drew near, sweat showed under the armpits of that purple shirt. Williams sat forward, as if ready to play, in the front row but no longer on the court. “Best job in the world, man,” he said.

It took about six years for Williams to arrive there, at his next vocation, comfortable with himself. Like most players, he identified with basketball before he lost it, same as Clark Kellogg, another player turned analyst who “shed many a tear when I stopped playing.” Unlike Kellogg, Williams retired at 21, before his career had really started.

At first, Williams tried to return to the N.B.A. He did not attempt a comeback for the money. The Guy Who Threw It All Away had put some savings in the bank. Most of his initial contract, in fact, more than $3 million. He lived off his endorsement income from Adidas and Chevrolet and others in that first season.

The Nets granted Williams a tryout. One owner hooked Williams up with a Zen-master type who taught him crazy dances and yoga poses. The moment Williams stepped back on the court in an N.B.A. jersey, in training camp in 2006, provided what he called “the happiest and saddest feeling of my life.” Happiest because he made it back, from a wheelchair to the highest level, and there were moments when he felt and played and scored like his old, explosive self. Saddest because of how fleeting those flashes were.

Williams still processed the game in the same way. He saw an opponent with his right foot an inch higher than his left, and he knew to attack that right foot, to put his left shoulder into the defender’s chest, knocking the defender off balance, clearing a path to the hoop. He could see that, but he could no longer react quickly enough to act out the visions in his head. He wore a bulky contraption on his left foot and a special shoe to keep his foot and toes from dragging.

He even joined the Austin Toros in the Development League, where his coach, Dennis Johnson, promised to get Williams back into the N.B.A. Then Williams tore his hamstring and ended up back in the hospital. While he was recovering, Johnson died of a heart attack.

His grandmother died. So did his dog. His mother needed a new kidney, and he offered one of his without hesitation, until her assistant volunteered instead. She received the kidney in 2008, on Sept. 22, a date that matched his jersey number. He pushed her through rehabilitation.

“Did I sound like this?” she asked.

He replied, “Every day for five years, Mom.”

Williams spoke again at a Duke basketball camp, told his story, even about how he considered suicide, as tears welled in Krzyzewski’s eyes. Williams walked onto the floor, aided by crutches, at Cameron Indoor Stadium, his jersey already hanging in the rafters. He mentored younger players. He focused on the run and not the way it ended.

“It’s when he started to believe that there was more to Jason than his true love,” Althea Williams said. “And that was basketball. He doesn’t want to be pigeonholed in his career now. He wants to do so many things. He doesn’t realize he pigeonholed himself into basketball for all those years. He was so shallow in terms of who he really was.”

Eventually, Williams latched on with ESPN and ESPNU. His credentials appealed to the network, as did his potential as an analyst.

Jay Levy, ESPN’s senior coordinating producer for men’s college basketball, said Williams learned to slow down over the past few years, to let the broadcast breathe. Williams watched as much tape as when he played. He started to pitch interviews, which showed initiative for an analyst among ESPN’s youngest, an analyst whose career goals include becoming the “African-American Matt Lauer.”

“I hope people remind me of my accident every day of my life,” Williams said. “Because that means I’m a prime example of somebody who had it and lost everything and may not have gotten it back in the same capacity but still reinvented myself.”

At every game Williams has covered, someone — another broadcaster, a producer, a fan — inevitably asked some variation of the Question. Why did he get on that motorcycle? You threw it all away, they tell him.

To which Williams often responds, “You’re right.”

Focus on the Future

Jay Williams had a dream a few weeks back. He saw two small children, with frizzy hair, running toward him on a beach. One called him “Papa.”

Williams is asked, if he had children, would he let them ride a motorcycle? He says he would, but he hopes they would choose not to.

His physical pain lingers, and when it is cold or damp outside, the knee creaks like an old wooden door. Sometimes, he asks his girlfriend, ESPN’s Charissa Thompson, to simply rub the knee, the action a magic elixir that puts Williams right to sleep. He wears sandals indoors because of poor circulation. He takes longer to recover from workouts. He sometimes trips as he walks.

“He will deal with the decision he made to ride that motorcycle, the physical repercussions, for the rest of his life,” Gauvin said. “He will not wake up one day and be recovered.”

Which is true, but not necessarily evident on the basketball court. Williams was there on a weekday morning in December, inside Duke’s practice facility, wearing a gray T-shirt darkened by his sweat. A black sleeve covered his left leg, not an inch of it exposed.

“Come watch me play basketball,” Williams said as he motioned over a few visitors. “People think that I can’t walk.”

Williams controlled the tempo of the game, pushing and slowing the pace as he felt necessary. His jumpers — feet a foot off the ground, arms fully extended, perfect follow-through — dropped through the basket, one after another, as if this game took place in 2001, not 2012.

On some mornings, Krzyzewski will stumble upon one of these contests, and he will smile at the sight of his former protégé and slip, if only for a moment, into “Damn, what might have been.” Same with Collins, now one of Williams’s regular opponents.

“It makes me so happy to see him out there,” Collins said. “When I see Jason on the court, it reminds me how much he loved to play. Then later I’m in my office, and that thought just breaks my heart. Because there’s no question, if he was healthy, he’d be one of the best guards in the N.B.A. right now.”

That afternoon, Williams took a quick spin through Duke’s basketball museum, past all the reminders of what was. He did not stay there long. That star turn is over now, as if it happened in another lifetime, back when he ruled the world, before he decided to conquer it again.

A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2013, on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Leg Rebuilt, A Life Renewed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe